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Chapter 4
Greece and Iran (Persia)
Classical Societies
1000 BCE to 600 CE
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The formation of enduring cultural communities
Connected by roads built for trade and ocean routes
The growth of cities and vigorous economies
The exchange and spread of great ideas, and disease
TRADITIONS and ENCOUNTERS—the big events within
and between societies
• Greece and Persia 1000-30 BCE
• Roman Empire and the Han Empire 753 BCE to 600 CE
• India and SE Asia 1500 BCE to 600 CE
Real Estate—Let’s Give a Grade
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Agricultural Possibilities, e.g. river valley…?
How easy is it to invade?
Access to trade and the exchange of ideas
Mesopotamia D (bad river, easy to invade, access to
trade good)
• Egypt A (great river, hard to invade, access to trade)
• China C (fair rivers, somewhat easy to invade, difficult
to trade)
• Indus A (great river, very hard to invade, good to trade)
maybe a great people need some
obstacles, but not too many…
• Mesopotamia struggles to catch a break, they will
be at their greatest during the golden age of
Islam, during the Abbasid Empire 700-1250,
when surrounded by friends…
• Egypt is the breadbasket of the ancient world,
but, I would argue, they tend to not be leaders or
innovators
• Indus—when the end comes it comes big…
• China has to struggle, has to innovate, and
therefore does, I would put Iran in this camp
• How about the US?
Iran’s Geography
• Mostly protected by mountains, deserts and the sea—hard
to invade, just a couple of times
• Earliest settlements along small streams and springs
• Many parts dry, so irrigation a necessity as populations
increased
• To avoid evaporation the people developed underground
irrigation with channels and shafts
• This required a great deal of labor and the organization of
labor
• Well connected by ocean trade routes, the Persians will
build roads
• But hard to invade—C+
Hostile Greeks
• Relatively little survives from the Persians
except what the Greeks tell us of the Persians
• And they warred over control of the Eastern
Mediterranean
• But there is no question that the Persians
developed the greatest empire the world had
ever seen
• And the people of Iran know this
Aryans-Iranians
• Based on language similarities, historians and
linguists have hypothesized the migration of
people from somewhere north of the Black
Sea in Russia to Europe, to North India and to
Iran, between 2000 and 1000 B.C.E.
• Thought to have arrived in Iran around 1000
B.C.E.
• Domesticated horses, chariots, herders
Achaemenids
• Cyrus (around 550 B.C.E.) consolidates and
conquers the neighbors—Mesopotamia, Turkey
• His son conquers Egypt
• Distant relative (Darius I) conquers the all the way
east to the Indus, all the way west to the Danube,
north to the Black Sea
• Warriors were landowners and dominated
society.
• Priests (Magi) and peasants
Persian Empire, around 500 BCE
Governance
• Darius created 20 provinces governed by a satrap, who was often a
relative, and the position often became hereditary
• The Persians did not interfere with the internal workings of the societies
they conquered, tolerant, cultivated cooperation of those conquered
• The further from the capital the more autonomy the satrap had in actual
governance
• The satrap collected tribute (taxes) to the king
• Some used for expenses, but most hoarded
• Which led to scarcity and made it increasingly difficult for provinces to
come up with the tribute
• Plus corruption…
• Great roads built to connect the empire
• Irrigation maintenance and expansion
• Workers had to be fed, housed, paid
• Ceremonial capital at Persepolis, administrative capital at Susa
Court
• Moved with the seasons
• Lots of wives, who were politically influential and owned substantial
property, and children
• Children of noblemen, held as semi-hostages to ensure good
behavior from their parents
• Central administrators
• Bodyguards
• Slaves
• The kind controlled a great deal of land and gave it for service
• Walled areas of gardens and luxury scattered throughout the
empire, paradayadam, became the English word paradise
300 Feet Above the Road is…
Behistun Inscription
Religion-Zoroastrianism
• Empire and the will of God
• Darius constructed the idea that God had given him a mandate to
bring order to the world and to ensure all people were treated
justly
• Ancient hymns, called Gathas, thought to have been written by
Zoroaster, explain ideas of the religion
• The world created by Ahuramazda
• Describe the world as a battle between good an evil, with goodness
destined to prevail
• Individuals rewarded or punished in the Afterlife
• Sensitive to the beauty of nature, prohibited the pollution of water
or the earth
• Corpses laid out on platforms to be picked clean by carrion birds
• Parsis today, largest population in Mumbai, India
5 Themes?
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Interaction with the environment*
State-Building***
Social classes*
Economics*
Culture*
Greeks--Geography
• Poor soils, quickly eroded, no rivers, but
adequate rainfall, generally poor agriculture—
goats, sheep, olives, grapes
• Mountainous, rugged landscape, internal travel
difficult
• But the sea provided protection from invasion
and, once they could navigate it, forced them to
trade and interact with the rest SW Asia and their
Mediterranean neighbors
• Overall grade of C
The Polis
• After the Mycenaeans, a dark age of poverty and
isolation 1150-800 B.C.E.
• I think is important to note that Homer is thought to
have lived just after the end of this period
• And I believe his epics are meant to be a profound
comment on the waste and destruction of war—not so
much about heroism
• The Greeks begin to trade and prosper after 800, when
the Phoenicians begin to visit, and bring their nifty
alphabet…
• Which was an enormously efficient new technology
More Polis
• It is thought their population explodes after 800,
perhaps an increase as much as 5 fold
• Increasingly dense populations led to a
consolidation of populations in the little plains of
rocky Greece—cities which controlled the
agricultural areas around them
• They never unite to become a “Greek Empire”
just too tough given the geography
• Various sizes, from a few thousand to a few
hundreds of thousands (Athens)
More Polis
• How are they run? Here is the thing, they try lots
of different types of governance, and then they
argue and write about it. What are the pros and
cons of different arrangements?
• An Acropolis and an Agora
• Free farmers formed the basis of their fighting
force, called hoplites
• Frequent battles between neighboring city-states
that took place during times they could get away
from the farm
Overpopulation, Migration and
Instability
• City-states frequently sent their excess
populations to other parts of the
Mediterranean, where they subdued or
intermarried with the indigenous population
• But there was an increasing instability in city
states due to debt slavery
• And an evolving tension between oligarchy or
democracy
Sparta v. Athens
• Sparta invaded and subdued their agricultural
neighbors of the Peloponnesian plain, made
them exploited, state-owned serfs, called
helots
• The helots outnumbered the Spartans 8 or 9
to one
• Which meant the Spartans had to be in a
constant state of readiness to put down a
helot revolt
More Sparta
• At age 7 boys were sent to the barracks where
they began a lifetime of military training an
discipline
• There was no other life for a Spartan male
• A merit based military, they enforced social
equality within Spartan society, banned coins
and commerce
Athens
• On the verge of civil war between the wealthy
and powerful and the majority of the population
• Solon in 594 proposes a peaceful resolution
• To give all males Athenians access to political
power, breaking the monopoly of power of a few
• And to abolish debt slavery
• In return the powerful and wealthy avoided a
bloody uprising in which they would be murdered
and their property confiscated
Persian v Greek Wars
• 499-479 off and on
• Rivalries over Greek city states on Persia’s
western border, then over the Greek mainland
• Darius and then his son Xerxes made massive
invasions of the Greek mainland and were twice
defeated
• Once because of the bravery and fierceness of
the Spartans
• And the second time because of the luck and
skills of the Athenian navy
The Golden Age of Greece
480-323
• Athen’s naval victory led to the creation of the
Delian League—the other city-states paid
Athens to maintain their navy
• Which made Athens rich and powerful
• The Parthenon and other great buildings
• The great plays, the great sculptures
• Socrates, Plato and Aristotle—more on them
later
Polykleitos Doryphoros
Inequality
• Of Athens 300,000 population only about 3040,000 were free males allowed that political
participation
• One third of the population were slaves,
ultimately lots of theories about how all those
slaves kept them from making much headway
with technology—why bother?
• Woman expected to bear children an run the
household
• Most of the fun took place away from home,
away from women
And War
• In 431 war broke out between Sparta and
Athens. Most of the other city-states lined up
on one side or the other. And enormous civil
war. It was obvious to both that they would
win
• Sparta wins and Athens is destroyed
• Conflicts between city-states continue off and
on throughout the 4th century, until
The Macedonians invade
• Philip of Macedon an innovator, used horses, a
cavalry, siege weapons (the first catapults)
• Defeats the bickering Greek city-states
• Is murdered
• And his son Alexander (356-323) takes over and
defeats Persian forces, campaigns as far as the
Indus River, takes Egypt
• He establishes Greek city-states throughout the
lands he conquers, and dies at 32—suspicious
circumstances
The Hellenistic World
• 323-30 B.C.E.
• Alexander’s vast empire divided and ruled by 3
generals
• The Seleucids rule Persia, the Ptolemaics rule
Egypt (Cleopatra is the last of the Ptolemaics)
and the Antigonids rule Greece
• Called Hellenistic because of the powerful
influence of Greek society on western Asia
and Northeastern Africa
Seleucids
• Soon lost the eastern areas
• Ruled Syria, Iran and most of Turkey using the
structures of Persia
• With Greek style cities
• Intermarriage
Ptolemaics
• The wealthiest, because Egypt was wealthy
• And easiest to rule, centralized by the Nile
• The greatest city of this time was Alexandria in
Northern Egypt
• Because of its massive library
• Significant advances in mathematics, medicine,
an astronomy
• The Ptolemaics did not bother to learn Egyptians,
except Cleopatra
Antigonids
• Based in Macedonia, with garrisons
throughout southern areas of Greece
• Athens maintained neutrality, and became the
place the elites of the Mediterranean world
sent their children to be educated
• Sparta mounted various unsuccessful
campaigns against the Macedonian armies
Legacy of the Hellenistic World
• Many ethic groups, but the elites learned
Greek
• And Greek ideas such as mathematics,
rhetoric and the value of learning
• The alphabetic writing of the Greeks made
widespread literacy possible
• The most powerful cultural influence on the
middle east until Islam